The present application relates generally to ripsawing operations in which a wide incoming board is sawed into a plurality of narrower boards for uses such as flooring, moldings, furniture, and the like, and in which the opposite edges are removed to become waste strips. The application more particularly relates to an apparatus and an associated method for removing these waste strips after they have been separated from the incoming board, so that the waste strips can be routed to one destination while the sawn boards are routed to a different destination.
Typical hardwood rip optimization systems utilize either a moving fence with fixed saws or a fixed fence with shifting saws to obtain the targeted solution for ripped lumber. In either case most of these systems are designed to rip random-length lumber for best material yield by determining the optimum number of targeted widths that can be obtained from the incoming board. Every board ripped in a wood-ripping optimizing process produces one or more usable targeted widths and two waste strips constituted by the opposite edges. These waste strips can be located at various positions on the outfeed conveyor depending on the rip pocket location and/or the width of the incoming board. These waste strips are moving at the speed of the boards being sawed, which typically is from about 50 to about 500 fpm.
These waste strips must be located, removed, and deposited onto a waste conveyor as they are produced. The removal process up until now has been done either manually or with some type of mechanical assist. This is an ineffective use of expensive labor, but more importantly, a critical and hazardous operation.